


Supporting Cast.

by Jackmerlin



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2017-05-11
Packaged: 2018-10-30 01:05:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10865841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jackmerlin/pseuds/Jackmerlin
Summary: Various minor characters reflect on their brush with the Marlowverse.The first chapter is a character from the Marlows And The Traitor.End Of Term, Thuggery Affair and Attic Term follow.





	1. Ida Cross

**Author's Note:**

> These are not new stories but were previously on my LJ journal.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "She's one of those plain creatures. Stringy hair, and a pale, thin face, and rather thick glasses."  
> The Marlows And The Traitor.

Ida left work at her usual time and walked in her weary, plodding way down the street. Something about the way she trudged in her flat shoes suggested an aching back. As she turned into the shabby street of lodging houses where she lived, she heard quick steps behind her.  
"Excuse me, miss," said the young man behind her. "You dropped this." Ida took the crumpled handkerchief that the man was holding out. It certainly wasn't hers, but as she took it she felt a crumple of paper within the folds. The man was already walking away as fast as he had approached. She looked at the torn scrap of paper: two words only - LEAVE TONIGHT.  
She slipped into the boarding house and up the stairs to her drab and dingy room. She was unobserved; the pervasive smell of cabbage and the clink of cutlery told her that her landlady was already seeing to her 'gentlemen' in the dining room. The landlady liked her male boarders but rarely bothered to hide her contempt for the dowdy spinster, Ida.  
Ida had a small valise already packed in the bottom of her wardrobe. She pulled off her frumpy clerk's outfit which managed to disguise her slim but very feminine figure. The little black dress she slipped on instead showed off her curves and her long legs. Next she sat down in front of the spotted mirror and transformed herself. Thick glasses discarded, hair brushed up into an elegant bun, smoky make-up around her eyes, cheeks subtly flushed with powder, and scarlet lips. She smiled at her reflection; while even expert make-up couldn't make her look beautiful exactly, it could, and did, make her look glamorous and sexy. Yes, very sexy when she smiled in that knowing way.  
While her landlady served spotted dick and lumpy custard in the dining room, Ida took her chance to slip through the kitchen and out of the back door. The night was quiet and the streets deserted, but anyone seeing the elegant lady with a fur wrap over her evening dress would take her for a rich man's mistress going to meet her lover at the theatre or the opera. The small purse she held could easily have contained a dainty pair of opera glasses instead of the small but serviceable pistol which it actually contained.  
At the station, her voice when she asked for a ticket on the boat-train, was low and husky; unrecognisable from Ida the clerk's pedantic and monotonous tone. Her hands fluttered slightly as she talked to the man in the ticket office, which combined with a faint trace of an accent, led him to believe she was French. Anyone who saw her settle into her seat on the train and pull out a small, French paperback would have thought the same.  
Looking out of the train window into the darkness, but seeing only her own transformed reflection in the window, Ida sighed. She would be Louise in Paris, she thought. She had enough money to keep her going until she could get a job as an English teacher in a French school. A small, select school, she hoped, and she would be very eccentrically English there. She would finally be doing what her parents had always suggested she do. She had wanted to be an actress when she left school, but her father wouldn't pay for her to go to drama school. "You're not going to be an actress with your looks" he had said. "No-one's going to want to see you swooning in the hero's arms!" As if that was what acting was all about!  
A pity that Lewis probably wasn't going to get through this. Anyone writing reports on this when it was all over, was going to assume that she had been in love with him, that he had seduced her into treachery. but it hadn't been like that at all. It was just that Lewis had understood, in a way no-one else had, that she could play a part. That she could be a different person at different times and places; that she didn't have to be a certain type of person just because she looked the way she looked.... that she didn't want people to assume they knew what she was like just because they thought her plain. Because that was what most people did all the time. Lewis had seen that she too was excited by the idea of doing something just because you could, just because people didn't expect it. There had been moments though, when he had smiled at her, with those eyes ... Poor Lewis, by now he would probably have been ... well.. expended.  
A few years in Paris now; that would be amusing. And when she got bored of that she could always come back to England and be a French teacher in an English school...


	2. Angel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The little boy went on staring at Miranda, and continued to stare, gazing over his shoulder as he was marched off, and wrenching his hand away from his virtuous partner who wanted to yank him round and make him behave. Miranda was the first angel he'd ever seen, and he meant to make the most of her."
> 
> End Of Term.

Anthony’s flatmate banged on his door and came in without waiting for him to answer, which was just as well, because absorbed in his painting, he barely heard her.  
“What are you painting now?” Kate asked.  
“Feathers,” said Anthony absently.  
Kate looked. A photograph of a white gyrfalcon was taped to the edge of Anthony’s easel. The huge canvas was filled with great wings of white feathers, so real that she almost wanted to run her fingers through them. The face above the wings was inhuman and fierce, frightening in its remoteness. Kate shuddered. “It’s another angel. What is it with angels?” she asked, adding “You’ve been in here for two days. You need to come out for some air.”  
She looked round the basement room at the stacked canvases, piles of drawings and half-finished sketches. There were angels everywhere, from detailed pencil drawings of angel anatomy to abstract daubs in which angeloid forms had ‘eyes as flame and wings as drifted snow’. A still life which had been completed for a college assignment seemed to be of a bowl of satsumas and a couple of Christmas ornaments, but the baubles lay on a Christmas card showing finely painted Mediaeval angels which reflected eerily in the curved glass.  
“Doesn’t your tutor mind that you always do the same thing?” she asked curiously.  
“Not since the man from Saatchi bought one,” said Anthony. “If I sell them it’s a legitimate artistic obsession. If I don’t, I’m a nutter.” And he grinned at her suddenly.  
“Well, I do wonder myself sometimes. But why do you?”  
“I saw one,” said Anthony dreamily, dabbing at a feather.  
“What?”  
“An angel. When I was young.”  
“Anthony, you’re scaring me now!” she said, partly sarcastic, but partly alarmed.  
“In a sort of church.”  
“What, a carving or something?”  
“No, she was real.”  
“How ….?”  
“We’d been taken to see a play, I think. I don’t remember much about it. I was only little. But I remember the angel.”  
“Oh, an actor, you mean?”  
“No. They were only school kids. But this one was real. I could tell. You could see she didn’t belong there. The others were just dressing up. I think she was cross she had to be with them. Because she was different and fierce and she – glowed somehow.”  
“I think you’ve breathed in too many paint fumes. Come out with me. I need some moral support anyway – the stage manager wants me to pick up some bits for the drawing room scene, and it’s a really expensive address and you’re much better than me with snobby people.”  
“Is that the annoying stage manager you don’t like?”  
“Yes, the one who’s always going on about how she was at school with Lawrie Marlow. And this shop’s run by another old school friend of hers so it’s bound to be posh.”

XXX

Outside the shop, looking at their reflections in the window, Kate panicked.  
“I should have made you change. And your hair’s all covered in paint.”  
But Anthony was staring through the window. Ignoring Kate he opened the door and went in. She smoothed her hair down and followed hurriedly.  
Anthony had stopped in the middle of the shop, transfixed. “It’s you,” he said in an awed whisper.  
“You must be from the theatre,” said the elegant lady, coming towards them. She held out her hand to shake. “Miranda West.”  
Anthony’s hand trembled and his voice was husky. “It’s you. It’s really you.”  
“Well, of course it’s me,” said the angel and took him by the hand.


	3. Firechick.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "the chick opposite was very professional indeed: her black hair flopped exactly on the shoulders of her black shiny jacket, her black pullover had the proper bulkiness, and her short skirt and kinky boots revealed black lace knees. She wore no make-up and her grey eyes, neither friendly nor hostile, watched Sophia: Sophia, unobtrusively copying the way she held her cup in both hands, the handle pointing to the centre of the table, also copied her look: and after a while the chick smiled faintly and gazed into her cup."  
> The Thuggery Affair.

It had been a long and tedious session at the pub where Pen worked a lunchtime shift. Wearily she entered the communal hallway of her apartment block. Scattered on the table were other peoples’ junk mail, free newspapers and takeaway menus. She rummaged hopefully, looking for anything that might be hers. She was in luck, finding an unpromising brown envelope addressed to Miss Penelope Turner and stamped with the London postcode of the publishers she did occasional work for. Hoping it was an overdue cheque she grabbed it and headed down the steps to the basement flat she shared with her daughter.  
Loud music emanating from a closed bedroom door told her that Pru was home from school. She sighed. Only this morning her upstairs neighbour had caught her in the hallway and made pointed remarks about how often they were disturbed by loud music coming from the basement flat. But she couldn’t face another screaming match with her daughter. At least she knew where she was, she thought. At that age she herself had spent her time running round town, hanging out with anyone who could stand her an espresso in one of the seedier coffee bars. And then going for rides on the backs of motorbikes.  
It was Prudence’s father who had nicknamed her Pen. He said she reminded him of the classic description of a swan, calm and beautiful on the surface, but churning away underneath. She was churning away even worse after he left her pregnant; vanishing like smoke over water before the morning sickness had even worn off. And all those friends who had embraced free love and thought it was ‘groovy, man’ had distanced themselves as soon as she was left with an unwanted little consequence. But she and Pru had survived, just. She had to give up her course at art school but she painted pictures on the back of cardboard boxes, selling them at street markets, with Pru sleeping in a papoose on her back. She did grotty cleaning jobs, Pru grizzling herself to sleep in a pushchair, while Pen mopped floors. Then an art school friend put her in touch with a small greetings card company, who started buying her work. The income from them was minute but regular, and led on to her getting some occasional work illustrating book jackets, which was better paid but irregular. She had submitted artwork for the new paperback edition of a hardback bestseller which she was waiting to be paid for, but ripping open the brown envelope now she was disappointed to find a letter but no cheque.  
Her art work had been satisfactory blah blah blah, she read, but the rights to the book had just been bought up by a film production company. Could she redesign the front cover to look like a scene from the story featuring Michael Caine and Sophia Lawrence.  
Pen frowned at the letter. Who on earth was Sophia Lawrence? The trouble was that she hadn’t been to the cinema herself for ages. When Pru was younger she had taken her to the cinema as a treat when they could afford it, but now Pru was older it made more sense to give her the ticket price and let her go with a friend. Pru was mad about films and acting; she would know who this Sophia was, she might even have a picture in one of her magazines.  
Pen paused outside her daughter’s bedroom door. She wasn’t going to mention the mess, she told herself. Or nag about homework. She tapped gently and entered.  
“What?” said Pru, resentful of intrusion. Why did teenagers always have to add an extra syllable into ‘what’, thought Pen, but she replied calmly.  
“I just wondered, love, do you know who Sophia Lawrence is?”  
“ _Everyone_ knows who Sophia is, Mum! Where have you _been_?”  
“Oh. Well, I don’t. What’s she been in? Do you have a picture?”  
“This is her latest one,” said Pru, getting off the bed and sifting through the magazines on the floor. She opened the magazine at a centrefold, and showed her mother. ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ declaimed the letters written in dripping blood under a close-up photo of the actress’ face. Pen gazed at the pale skin, the huge gothic eyes and the smudged red lips.  
“She seems familiar. I must have seen her in something. What else has she been in?”  
“Nothing you’d have seen,” said Pru, with implicit scorn. “She was in ‘Last Dance With The Devil’ and ‘Revenge of the Undead Bride’.”  
“They don’t sound like films you ought to have seen,” said Pen, aiming for light, dry humour but only managing to sound disapproving.  
“Oh Mum!” exclaimed Pru in disgust, flopping back on the bed and pulling a pillow over her head. Mum became another two syllable word in her daughter’s mouth. Pen sighed.  
She trod carefully over the clutter on the floor on her way out. “It’s time you sorted this room out,” she said. “And don’t you have any homework you should be doing?”

XXXX

 

She sat at the kitchen table armed with a pencil and eyed the vampire pin-up without enthusiasm, wondering which scene from the book to illustrate. It was an odd face, she thought, looking more closely, pale and ageless, compelling without being beautiful. It was just a still photo, and yet the face conveyed fear and cruelty combined. Pen started to feel interested. The expression on the actress’ face had something else - it was the look of someone borne along by powerful forces, both exhilarated and terrified, but ultimately out of control.  
She had read the book she had to design the cover for - a ridiculous crime thriller. In fact she prided herself on always reading the books that she had to work on, even though that meant she’d had to plough through some pretty dreary stuff. This book was certainly a page turner, but it implicitly glamorised organised crime and Pen knew from experience that no crime was really like that. The reality was a messy swamp of stupidity and greed in which those with no sense or no choice ended up sinking, she thought sadly.  
She started doodling. In one scene, a gang leader had kidnapped the other gang leader’s girl friend and was walking her down a street at gunpoint. Pen drew. A couple walking close together, as close as lovers entwined, but he’s holding a gun to her neck. The twist in the book was that the girlfriend had actually been having an affair with the rival gang leader, and the subsequent revenges and reprisals dragged on for another hundred pages. Pen paused, wondering what expression she should show on the girl’s face. Fear obviously, but was she only acting scared because she knew the kidnap was just a ploy? Was she really scared because she didn’t trust her lover and suddenly didn’t know where this was going to end up? Was it genuine fear because she didn’t know anything about the plan and she was horribly afraid? Pen sketched, and as she drew Sophia Lawrence’s face her memory shifted into place and she knew where she had seen her before.  
An afternoon in a coffee shop. She only remembered because it was the last time she had ever seen Rigid before his stupid, little gang got busted and half of them ended up dead. Including the beautiful Jukie. It was Jukie who had started calling her Spin. There had been one night, when everyone else had been off their heads on something or other, and she and Jukie had had nothing more than coffee, sitting talking late into the night, sharing edited versions of their childhoods, that she had felt ….Well, it was a shame he wasn’t really into girls.  
The girl though. Looking like she’d been playing with her mother’s make-up, wearing a mac that smelled of farmyard, an accent like the Queen’s. But all the same, she carried it off, just. Rigid had been practically drooling. She had seemed brighter, sharper, more daring than any of them. Then their eyes had met, just briefly, and Pen had seen an abyss of panic.  
She had been worried then. Because she had never been quite sure of Rigid - how much of what he said was boasting and how much was real. But they had left to go to the cinema, and she had thought, well, there’s only so much Rigid can do in there. And then later, feeling uneasily anxious, going back to the cinema and seeing the police outside with the girl, she had wondered what had happened.  
She’d run into Rigid, looking bothered, and told him what she’d seen. For a moment he’d lost all his cool. He’d let Jukie down. What would Kinky do? Rigid grabbed her arm. He asked if he could hole up at her place for the night, till things blew over. And she had been on the verge of agreeing, until he couldn’t help himself from winking insinuatingly at her. Repelled, she had laughed and shrugged him off.  
Friends-of-friends said they’d seen him again once or twice when he got out of prison. But he hadn’t hung around, and by then Pen was sinking under the weight of nappies and single motherhood anyway.

XXXX

The bedroom door slid open and Pru emerged. She was carrying a pile of dirty clothes which she dumped in front of the washing machine. Better there than on her floor, thought Pen hopefully.  
“You know, if you’re interested, ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ is still on at the cinema,” said Pru, apparently casually.  
“I don’t think I can afford it till I get paid for this,” said Pen. “You know why I recognised her? I met her once. When she was about your age, actually.”  
“No. How could you?”  
“She was dating a friend of mine. She came into the café where we used to hang out. It was the place to go.”  
Pru rolled her eyes at the unlikely thought of her mother ever having been young and cool, but sounding impressed in spite of herself, she said, “You know, it’s awfully cheap at the Palace Cinema if you go in the afternoons.” She added cautiously, “I’ve still got my paper round money. We could go together? I’d like to see it again.”  
“Oh no, love, I couldn’t possibly…”  
“Really Mum. You should come and see Sophia Lawrence. She’s seriously awesome!”  
“Well, it would be lovely to go together. But I’ll pay you back as soon as I get my pay..”  
“Yeah yeah. And you can tell me properly all about how you met her!”


	4. Esther Goes Home.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last chapter of Attic Term, as seen by Daks.

Me bored. Me bored place. Basket. Bored.  
Smells. Rabbit smells. Small-thing-not-rabbit smells. Big dog smells.  
Me scared big dog. Big dog sleeps.  
Me sleeps. Long-night-long-time-sleeps.  
Light comes. Me need pee.   
They come. Rabbits theirs come. Small-thing-not-rabbit theirs come. Big dog his come. Big dog bark! bark! bark! out! out! out!  
Mine come! Mine! Mine! Out! Out! Out!  
Grass! Me pee! Me run! Much grass. Smells. Big dog he pee here.  
Ball now? Ball please? Ball? No ball.  
Mine sad. Mine sad. Wet face. Me fur wet now. Don't be sad. Don't be sad. Me wriggle. Me lick. Me sad too. Why sad? Me here.  
Bored place. Basket. Mine sad. Mine sad. Wet face sad. Me sad too. Me come too? Me come too? Not be sad? Me come?  
Me come! Me come! Me come!


End file.
